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Tips from the Trenches – June 2014

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Best Practice Recommendations for Reporting Teams

Jason Hughes, Senior Healthcare Technical Consultant
Jason Hughes, Senior Healthcare Technical Consultant

One aspect of my many roles as a HSI Senior Healthcare Technical Consultant, that is truly fulfilling, is sharing my knowledge of best practices with my clients and working with them to obtain maximum value from their EMR investment.

One of the challenges a new or an existing Epic reporting team faces is to work effectively and efficiently. As an example, at one of my client sites, my assignment was to assist the team in managing the overwhelming amounts of work awaiting their attention due to several ongoing initiatives (Meaningful Use project, Quality project, etc.), in addition to the usual day-to-day Epic reporting needs. The team was struggling!

During the time I spent with the Reporting Team, I learned about their processes, the training they had received and the environment in which they worked. I was able to gain their trust and respect with my report build expertise and the suggestions and recommendations for best practices..

Some of the best practice recommendations included:

SQL training for the report writers

Documentation and standardization across the board (processes, QA, SQL and Crystal code, standard templates for Crystal Reports, etc…)

Using SQL functions and/or procedures

Using ETL tools such as SQL Server Integration Services when appropriate and not scheduling data dumps in Business Objects

Some of the benefits they realized from these recommendations included:

Faster report development

More efficient and streamlined code/reports

Re-usability of code allowing for making a change in one place versus twenty places

Report Server running more efficiently and in turn getting reports out quicker each day

Report developers now had the skillset to handle problems they may encounter such as troubleshooting their own code to find inefficiencies, flaws, etc.

What a rewarding experience for me; the client was appreciative for preparing the Reporting Team to be responsive to their internal customers but they also now had a better tool kit to help them in the future.

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